The painful departure of my miracle daughter

GIVE ME A BREAK:ONE MINUTE you're about to give birth and wondering if you're depriving your first-born by going medical instead of having a birthing pool, the next minute she's a beautiful young woman texting you from a jacuzzi in Spain, writes Kate Holmquist

Where does the time go? And when people say, as they said to me 17 years ago as I held my new baby, my first child, my miracle daughter in my arms, "enjoy her, babies are on loan, not for keeps", what kept me from believing them?

My on-loan daughter is on holiday with her best friend and her friend's family in Spain, staying at a four-star hotel with a jacuzzi in her en suite, and I, and her father, are mourning her as though she has died. Which she hasn't, I hasten to add (knock on wood). She will be delivered safely home by Aer Lingus this week and I'll collect her at the airport and fold her into my arms knowing, as mothers do, that I have a yet again wiser and more experienced child to take care of.

In other words, my child may benefit from a few days' holidays here and there with generous friends, but damn it, she's going to be living under my roof until she's at least 30 years old.

I will not let her go.

Even though I know I must let her go.

The first time I let her go was more than 20 years ago, seven years before her birth. My husband and I were told that we were unlikely to have children because of the cancer treatment he had survived, so I told myself that babies weren't meant to be in my life's plan. I must have been about 28 years of age.

It was a New Year's Day, when I was doing a shift as a reporter in the newsroom, and I was sent on an assignment that women reporters working New Year's Day at that time were inevitably sent on: going along with a photographer to see the first babies of the new year and interview their mothers.

The joy was something I was ordered to express. The sadness I felt at the time, believing then that I would never be a mother, is something that hangs on to me to this day, like bits of lint and dirt on the hem of an otherwise impeccably tailored skirt. Because I never expressed it.

In other words, I braved it out. The births of the first babies of the year were duly reported and the photographs were published and that was that. I accepted that I would never be part of that aspect of the mother-child event, my own mother having died many years previously, leaving me her memories of my being the first baby of the year in Vermont.

Five years later, my daughter was born. Then her sister three years after that and her brother two years later and now we are a family.

And now our family is breaking apart. As it is supposed to.

Our children are on loan, that's true. The child who refused anything but plain pasta and potatoes is suddenly willing to taste sushi and tapas and 20 kinds of cheese.

She held your hand on her first day of Montessori so tightly that you had to force yourself to push her through the door, and you held back tears as you disentangled her tiny fingers from yours. You didn't know then - as you turned your back on her and walked away as the Montessori teacher advised you to - whose hot tears you were feeling, hers or yours.

Then, in the blink of an eye, she's 17 and she's making her way through an airport alone and flying to a place you will never know and shouldn't know because, after 17 brief years, she has her own life.

Because that's what you always wanted her to have. Her own life. That's why you gave birth to her and reared her. You wanted her to be independent. The confident child, as any number of child-rearing manuals said, was your goal.

No one told you how much it would hurt, as you encouraged the confidence of the child that could make her way through airport security and text you at the gate to say the aircraft's about to board, then text you when she has arrived to say "Hi Mom, I love you!" Isn't that the child I wanted? The child who could make her way through and find friends and discover a life that I can never be a part of? My own mother - dead so long that I'm older now than she was when she died - taught me that lesson. Teach them, love them, enjoy them, let them go.

But, damn it, I'll be at the airport on Thursday to bring my daughter home and it will be a while - a few months maybe - before I let her go again.